


The light that shrivels a mountain

by lilith_morgana



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-28
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2018-10-24 13:37:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10742763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: They will need new terms for everything now, a whole new vocabulary for their existence.Sara Ryder and Harry Carlyle try to get their bearings in a new galaxy as they find themselves closer to each other than they ever expected.





	1. Prologue: One for the ages

The neon outline of the Silversun Strip almost rivals the lights inside the vast flat where the Milky Way’s best and brightest are hobnobbing tonight. It’s an impressive display put on by - among others - a handful of renowned scientists, eccentric billionaires and a few figureheads like N7 legend Alec Ryder. Big and pompous but somehow still somber enough, just the way these things are supposed to be. And Harry Carlyle isn’t a detective but even so he can spot the trail of Something Else going on behind these carefully constructed facades.  
  
Harry once knew Ryder’s wife Ellen but that seems like ages ago now, in another world entirely. She had been a Harlow then and sat beside him during lectures; her mind had been a maze of cleverness and creativity and he had felt inferior to her on several occasions - inferior and impressed because he likes to pride himself in always being able to appreciate brilliance. Now it all feels like a closed chapter. A remnant from when the galaxy had felt fresh and untraveled and people weren’t in all seriousness plotting their escape from it.  
  
“Surely there are ethical ramifications-” an elderly man - chief engineer Adams, stationed at SSV Sparta - points out but are cut off by a younger man, one of Harry’s former students. Brenner, he recalls. Morgan Brenner, with ambitions twice as high as his IQ.  
  
“That’s always been said for new discoveries!” he blurts now. “The relays, FTL, even spaceships!”  
  
“You make careful consideration sound outdated,” Jien Garson says from a few feet away. Her voice is cool, deep; when she motions herself towards them everyone watches. “But last time I checked we still live in a society that favor evidence based theories over speculation.”  
  
Harry stifles a sigh. It’s not that the concept itself - an evening of debate and speculation about everyone’s personal obsessions -  is boring, because it’s not. It’s actually mostly the individuals present that are dull. Everyone here is so imbued with greatness, wrapped in an air of arrogant successes and with such an abundance of means that it leaves them with nothing interesting to speak of. It’s an existence without friction, without _resistance_ and it washes away everything besides these smooth, polished surfaces that rivals the facades of the buildings outside. These are men and women of the future; most of them are already halfway there, living through future glory in their own minds. The Andromeda Initiative promises to stroke the egos of the already grandiose personas of their galaxy - he has yet to learn anything about it that is aimed at the less fortunate.  
  
There _are_ things that could tempt him when it comes to leaving the Milky Way behind, he’s not going to lie to himself about that. Things, reasons, motivations. One of the major ones is the dead-end of science as they know it.  
  
The human mind - the human _sight_ \- is ultimately a failed one, clouded by history or regret or faith. Not necessarily a spiritual faith either, which he can at least understand the outlines of, but a conservative faith in old science and outdated doctrines, as though hundreds of years of intergalactic collaborations haven’t altered their arts entirely.  
  
That kind of backwards thinking is the one extreme in medicine. The other is represented by individuals such as Alec Ryder himself and that perspective sees no limits to anyone’s reach or claim. If you can, you must. Harry can’t fall in line behind that way of reasoning either, can’t abandon that lingering sense of what’s right and wrong or what _ought_ to be right by all sensible standards.  
  
Or wrong. Goodness knows it’s mostly when it goes badly one needs those guidelines in the first place.    
  
He swallows a mouthful of wine. Networking has never been his favorite pastime but even if it had, this is an extreme case of it and only irritation and frustration with current events at Huerta Memorial has brought him here. Looking around this room he can spot at least four or five doctors and scientists with - he suspects, but he was always an excellent guesser - the same set of motivations. With recent discoveries and breakthroughs after the Geth invasion, Harry and his colleagues had somehow assumed their work would follow in line, open up to new schools of thought, but instead they had met heavy resistance among medical bureaucrats and human diplomats alike. Never before has it been made so abundantly clear to him that he has reached a dead end in his research.  
  
Ten years ago when he had been climbing up the apex of his career and hosted several seminars at the Citadel, he would never have imagined signing up for something that will, in every way, strip him of all his connections and reputation and spit him out on a remote colony somewhere. A lifetime of hard, dedicated medical work ending on a brave new world.  
  
“There will likely be another war here,” Adams says. “Our resources-”  
  
“ _Our_ resources?”  
  
No, Harry thinks. The centuries-old ideal of humanity as a collective certainly seems to have lost impact.  
  
“The Initiative is not unmoved by the plight of the Milky Way.”  
  
“That’s what you’d like me to believe, isn’t it?”  
  
Garson gives a little laugh that sounds sharp against the people in the crowd. “We would hardly invest our time and credits into this project if we wished for _anything_ but prosperity for generations to come.”  
  
Adams shakes his head. “Prosperity as a measurement of success, now _that_ is outdated.”  
  
_Touché, old man._  
  
The conversation fades out and becomes soaked up in the noise of the large room and Harry turns away slightly, marking his disinterest as subtly as he possibly can. Which isn’t subtle at all. There’s something about these gatherings that strips him to the bare bones, as if the formal wear only ever serves as a reminder that he still isn’t assimilated enough for the bored exhaustion not to get to him. A simple upbringing is such a cliche but still true for many of them even up here, in the fancy apartments at the Citadel. Not that they’re on top of the hierarchy, far from it, but high enough for it to be a place where people want to spend several hours.  
  
At least the drinks are nice and strong and the food is well-suited to its purpose.  
  
Removing himself even further from the discussion, he spots a woman standing by the large panorama window; she’s alone and holds a beer bottle in on hand as she tampers a bit with her omni-tool. Oblivious to everyone else or acutely aware, he can’t say from a distance and somehow he’s intrigued enough to want to know.  
  
Around him he can hear low voices talk about black-ops, about the N7 program, about Commander Shepard and the Council; there's a large group of medical professionals, too, and they mainly discuss recent discoveries in xenomedicine and restrains infringed on them.   
  
Once, he met his wife at a party not too unlike this one.  
  
Wedged in between rambling old scholars and over-eager military strategists fresh out of some SpecForces program, he had spotted her: short, pink-haired, overdressed and _striking_ in all her awkwardness.  
  
Judith Krinth, about to become one of the most prominent sociologist of the century and embark on a splendid career in the intergalactic paralegal community. Back then she hadn’t been famous for those things, of course. Back then she had just been a very clever, obscenely funny girl and Harry had fallen in love with her after one drink together. One drink and then twenty years of them.  
  
Their marriage - like so many of the marriages in their circle of friends, a quiet little epidemic - ended in a divorce but while it lasted it had continually amazed him.

He had really wanted kids, to start a family; she had really not. It’s far from the only reason but it had been the start of a waning in their marriage that they never properly managed to recover from. So many ups and downs in fifteen years and somehow they usually ended up in bed, or at a restaurant, laughing at something together. Elasticity, someone had called it once. The measurement for healthy relationships: how far you can leap in either direction and still be returned to the heart of it all. But this had been something from which they hadn’t bounced back. Some days he mourns her like he mourns the dead.  
  
Tonight, there’s no pink-haired sociologist in the crowd but there’s a woman inspecting him from a few meters away. Pretty, he thinks to himself as he crosses the floor and approaches. But likely too young. _For what, Harry?_  
  
“Sara.” She extends her hand; he takes it. A trace of something crosses her face as their eyes meet.  
  
“Hello, Sara. My name is Harry Carlyle.”  
  
There’s a certain look at the bottom of her gaze, he finds, a certain edge to her entire being that tells him she’s the kind of person it will turn out to be nearly impossible to establish a personal history for. A wild sort of trait, a lack of confinements that runs deep. It’s appealing and - when he encounters this among his patients - slightly infuriating.  
  
“What kind of famous and important fool are you, then?”  
  
He feels the corners of his mouth twitch at her bluntness. She really _is_ young, no doubt about it; it’s a young person’s bravado hammering behind every word and there are days when he misses this in himself, other days when he wonders if he ever had it or if he was always intent on success and accomplishment.  
  
“I’m a medic,” he offers. “Trained surgeon. Specialized in neurosurgery.”  
  
Once, among different people, that used to be impressive. _Did it now? Really?_ These days he doesn’t expect it to awake any kind of reaction besides the one this Sara is giving him now: a brief nod.  
  
“And you?” he asks instead, trying to come up with a qualified guess in his head. Not old enough to be anything that demands the kind of extensive education that gets you invited to these gatherings - he sees no other students here, at least - and too sharp to be nothing but a security guard in civilian clothing.  
  
“Family.” Her gaze travels over the room until it rests at a young man standing beside Alec Ryder. A young man with a striking resemblance to her own features. Of course, he reminds himself. The Ryder twins. There’s an extensive medical file on her somewhere, even. The biotic twin from Ellen Ryder’s much-chronicled pregnancy.  
  
“Ah,” he says.  
  
“You know my dad?”  
  
“That would be an exaggeration.” Harry tries to summon his most recent memory involving the man in question but fails. Their paths very rarely cross and he can’t say he’s mourning the fact. Lately, word on the street is that Ryder is on the verge of making himself a pariah in more organisations than one, keeping up his stubborn and illegal research like a man possessed. In addition to his already arrogant personality, it's definitely not a winning concept. “We’re acquaintances, at best.”  
  
A little smile tugging at her mouth. “That’s pretty much how I feel about him, too.”  
  
He wonders if that’s the truth or a comment made in order to sound like something she isn’t, something she’d rather be. Once he might have claimed the same things about his family, the strangely distant mother and the father he barely saw more than occasionally at birthday dinners and holidays. _We are shaped by our early years_ , someone he used to work with echoes in his head and Harry wonders if that is still true, in this age of space and beyond. Maybe it never was, maybe it is now more than ever.  
  
“I suppose he’s a man who works hard,” Harry says, steering carefully along the neutral road of this conversation.  
  
“You could say that.” She smiles properly now and whatever hard traces he had spotted in her face before have completely vanished. It’s just youth, he thinks. Youth and some disappointment, most likely. Maybe sadness. There are rumors about Ellen Ryder floating about, rumors regarding her health and Harry finds himself wishing they are false, for this girl’s sake if nothing else.    
  
There’s something _about_ her. Something genuine, something misplaced among these people here tonight, maybe in this entire context. Harry himself can’t even begin to fathom all the hidden agendas behind the fancy words of Garson and her ilk, doesn’t even _want_ to start deciphering it because there’s a pull in there, too, an allure in falling for their golden worlds and new frontiers.  
  
And there’s something about her that tells him she feels the same way. Or maybe she’s just young enough to still be a full-blood cynic, gods know he was at her age. Either way, she’s got a _presence,_ a slow, steady kind of gravitas.  
  
Her dark eyes follows him, he has a sense of her even when he can tell she's watching something else. As though she leaves an imprint in the room. Decades ago Harry knows some people would have suggested it's a result of the biotic energy but common sense and science have dispersed that kind of nonsense – at least most of it, most of the time.

The reality is just that Sara Ryder is Ellen and Alec's daughter and has inherited a streak of intelligent charisma – hers – and a dominant sort of personality – his – and Harry is getting pretty damn drunk to be standing here, waxing lyrical about this kid in the first place.

Now she looks at him again, eyebrows slightly arched. “What?”  
  
“Nothing,” he says, offering a half-apologetic smile before looking out over the room again. “Quite a crowd tonight.”  
  
“Dad’s been even more obsessed with his research lately. And with this.” She makes a sweeping gesture. “What do you know about the Initiative?”  
  
Harry thinks while he sips his wine; there’s a dull headache forming around his temples, like a persistent little reminder to get more sleep. “Not much.”  
  
“Yeah.” She checks something on her wrist, possibly the time, but this entire setup reminds him of cheesy old vids and her behavior would belong to a spy in one of those, hired by someone high up in the ranks and programmed to report any Doubter to the powers that be. He nearly smiles. “I don’t, either. Scott, my brother, keeps trying to find out all sorts of things but there’s not much _there_.”    
  
“Or what’s there is very protected, perhaps.”  
  
She nods. “Will you join them?”  
  
_Them_ , he thinks, but doesn’t say. He’d have assumed Alec Ryder would make sure his family was on board with the plans before taking them further, but maybe he assumes they are. Maybe he doesn't care. Maybe this is part of his elaborate exile from every unpleasant current situation he’s ensnared in. Maybe this entire thing is so damn full of complications and complexities that Harry will never be able to wrap his head around them all.    
  
“I’m open to the idea,” he concludes after some consideration. It nearly surprises him to hear his own words, at least until he recalls his latest research project and the quest for funding.  
  
“Maybe we’ll be sharing an ark in the near future.” Sara flashes him a quick grin.  
  
In the corner of his eye he observes a trio of men his age deeply engaged in a conversation. One of them he identifies as Oleg Petrovsky, a man most people have considered long lost to dark ops and fringe groups. There’s a fleeting unrest at the idea of that kind of mark being left on this expedition, but then again why wouldn’t it be? Wherever they go they’ll carry the Milky Way with them.    
  
“No battleplan ever survives contact with the enemy,” he overhears Petrovsky say and then one of the other men makes a disdainful noise.  
  
“We’re not planning for war, Petrovsky.”  
  
Petrovsky laughs, a quick, hard laugh laced with a lifetime of battle experience. “You should.”  
  
Harry lets a mouthful of wine be his focus for a second, pretending to enjoy the taste the way he did back when Judith would drag him with her to assorted wine tastings at the Citadel. He had never achieved the manners of someone as refined as this ideal husband his ex-wife sometimes seemed to search for, but he had at least tried. That counts for something.  
  
“You’re going then?” he asks, turning his attention back to Alec Ryder’s daughter.  
  
She nods. “Probably. Yeah. Need to make sure Scott doesn’t get himself into trouble.”  
  
At every party there are moments where the setting changes, the tone alters and the crowds morph slightly - sometimes not at all - into something barely different. A quiet gathering turns into drunk people looking to dance, a dinner party with sober intellectuals end up as a riveting chamber play and a discussion that originated as a feud transforms into actual, fair debate.  
  
Tonight, he feels, he can either remain a cautious bystander or he can finish his wine, get the two of them another set of drinks and they can continue their conversation. He’d actually very much enjoy that and the varied reasons why aren’t something he needs to delve into - not right here and not right now.  
  
He’s just about to make this suggestion to Sara when he sees they have company - her brother, by the look of things, seemingly eager to drag her away. She shoots Harry a glance - lingering, but only for a fraction of a second - before smiling. A polite smile this time. _What did you expect?_  
  
“See you later, Harry Carlyle,” she says.  
  
And he’s left standing by the staggering view of the Citadel by night, hoping he’ll feel certain of whatever decision for his future he’s about to make.


	2. Promised land

  
Two nights before their ark departs into deep space and everyone’s supposed to be present and ready and accounted for, Sara drinks five glasses of wine in less than an hour and thinks of running away.    
  
The ship is massive, bigger than the entire apartment complex she had left for the last time a couple of days ago - her throat constricts at the thought, each breath a  _ gasp  _ \- and carefully constructed to allow room for people and their habits but even so she feels trapped. Caged inside a heavily confined space. The ship is bigger than she had thought, but mostly it’s full of  _ pods  _ and that sight triggers something deep down, lets out a whole arsenal of secret pains and nightmares.    
  
“I’m not great with goodbyes.” She taps fingertips along the metal spine of the wall in front of her, runs palms across its polished skin. Sturdy ship wall, made to last hundreds and hundreds of years; her mom would speak sometimes of early human settlers back on Earth, would turn their travels into bedtime stories about creaking wooden boats and hardships that eased once they reached the promised lands. Mom, endlessly unsentimental about everything except Earth history. It makes Sara smile a little now.    
  
“I prefer to think of it as the best escape of our time.” Harry Carlyle stands behind her, a mug of coffee in his hand. She suddenly wishes she’d had five of those instead. “Makes it easier.”   
  
Sara’s still wrapping her head around all the staff and titles but his place in their infrastructure she knows by heart. Doctor Carlyle and Doctor T’Perro, running scan after scan, medical questionnaire after medical questionnaire.  _ Are you experiencing nasal congestion after high pressure training? Do you suffer from anxiety attacks? Are you or anyone in your immediate family diabetic?  _   
__   
After the AI debacle and even more so after mom’s illness Sara knows that her dad has no respect left for the bulk of the intergalactic medical society, but even he has mentioned that he trusts Hyperion’s medical staff with his life.  _ That’s kinda the point _ , Scott had pointed out; dad had offered a little half-smile in return for the jibe. When they reinvent themselves along the way she wonders if they will pretend life used to be like that, full of friendly mockery and laughter.    
  
“So you don’t have any cold feet then?”    
  
She turns around to look at him. He shakes his head, sipping his coffee. “Not yet. You want to talk about yours?”   
  
“Hell yes.”   
  
He grins, wide and reassuring and crosses the floor so they’re next to each other. Outside the space station slumbers along with most of Hyperion’s residents.    
  
She knows him from somewhere, she thinks briefly and without speaking. One of dad’s few scientist friends, maybe. Someone he went to college with. There’s an edge of familiarity in his face, a shade of recognition as he looks at her, his gaze steady and full of depths. He’s the kind of person you talk to, without hesitation, before you even know he’s a doctor and probably contract-bound to hear you out.     
  
And Sara talks. The one and a half bottle of wine spills out of her in the shape of doubts and ramblings, fears and contradictions. She  _ talks _ . Harry doesn’t interrupt much, doesn’t interfere unless she keeps looping around the same thing for a third or fourth time and even then he’s sort of gracefully steers her towards a new topic or into a debate that actually  _ is  _ a debate and not just her monologue about the state of things.    
  
“You should get some sleep,” he tells her eventually, as her trail of thought on cryosleep fades out into a drawn-out yawn.    
  
As she’s nodding in agreement the room spins.  _ Fuck _ , she’s still so very drunk.   __   
  
“Harry,” she sighs. Her head tilted against his shoulder, his arm steadies her back as they walk down the corridor where one a handful of medical assistants are still working.  _ That’s dedication for you, Ryder. _ “You’re nice.  __ So  nice.”   
  
He chuckles; she feels his breath hot and damp against the side of her face. “I am. That’s why I’m here for this trip. That, and my unmatched brilliance.”   
  
“And your humility.”   
  
“That too.”    
  
“Here” he says when she’s finally cross-legged on a bed in cryo bay and he hands her a mug. “Drink this.You’ll thank me in the morning.”   
  
When she reaches for the mug with the unidentified drink - looks like cucumber and smells of cough medicine - her fingers brush over his knuckles, tapping along human skin instead of metal and she draws a sharp, steadying breath.    
  
“It will be okay,” she says. She isn’t sure if she’s trying to comfort herself or show a bravado she doesn’t have.    
  
Harry merely nods. “It will be okay.”    
  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
  
They sleep for hundreds of lightyears. She hopes she dreams. He knows he won’t.    
  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
The air in the cryo bay is spiced with something sharper than disinfectants.    
  
Scratching the back of her head, Sara breathes in through her nose in some kind of futile attempt at dissecting the smell, trying to break apart and identify. Sometimes the hubris of being a biotic gets the better of her and she briefly thinks she has super enhanced senses - she hasn’t, of course, and the air in here is just  _ weird _ . Inexplicably different.    
  
“Herbal remedies,” Harry says suddenly, giving her a brief nod. He’s tapping the screen of his omni-tool, likely updating or ticking off boxes on one of those endless lists Sara imagines every doctor on their Milky Way arks have. Vitals, stats, reactions. Keeping score, counting every sheep in their herd. Or her dad’s and Jian Garson’s herd, more accurately.  _ Shit, I really came along.  _ __   
  
She looks at him. “You’re growing herbs in here?”   
  
“Not me,” he smiles, quickly and in a way that tells her he finds that thought more than a little absurd. “But Doctor T’Perro has at least five inventions under her belt that rivals the medigel you can get from the Alliance requisition channels. Though that’s not saying much.” 

“Right.”    
  
He continues to explain the herbs as Sara’s concentration fades out, her gaze travelling over the bay. Six hundred years asleep and the awakening is just like any other morning, only foggier. Her throat is dry, her head pounds. Overall, it feels like the morning after a long night out at the Citadel bars with Jean and Frank, one of those nights that would usually end on the floor somewhere, sipping spiked soda from a shared bottle while discussing something faux-intellectual as the lights shifted around them. The ghost of alcohol in her system is the only thing that’s missing, the only thing that separates this from any other hangover. Well that, and the distinct lack of party in her recent past. Not that she’s ever been a social butterfly -  _ drop the datapad, Ryder; pick up a beer and smile _ \- but recently there’s been no room for anything but preparation, preparation, preparation.    
  
_ Recently _ . The word drops inside her, lands with a thump somewhere between her heart and ribs. They will need new terms for everything now, a whole new vocabulary for their existence.    
  
“How are you feeling?”   
  
The question pulls her back, a slow drag across the centuries that have passed.    
  
“Sorry for zooming out,” she blinks, shaking her head.    
  
He smiles again. “It was hardly vital information, unless you plan on becoming a botanist in your downtime. Are you feeling alright, all things considered?”   
  
She nods. “All things considered. Yeah. I just need some more coffee. And maybe something for the headache.”    
  
“I’m sure Doctor T’Perro will oblige once she’s scanned your implant again.” He looks over her shoulder, then back at her. “She will be here in just a few moments.”   
  
“And then it’s Scott’s turn, right?”    
  
His pod is still intact and there’s a restless shiver in her bones because of it. He had been the first to step inside his cryosleep too - always one for challenges and adventure - and she had watched him go, biting back both regrets and screams. No time for that. Never time for that in the Andromeda Initiative.    
  
“That is the idea.”    
  
“Right.”   
  
“It’s going to be okay,” he says to her while his gaze returns to the scan he’s performing.    
  
Sara isn’t sure she believes him this time either, but she likes to hear him speak the words all the same. 

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
It’s not okay.    
  
He takes cover behind a crashed shuttle as he monitors Haye’s stats to the very best of his currently limited abilities; above them the thunderstorm burn through the sky and he tries to reconcile the images of it with images of home.  _ What did you expect, you nostalgic old fool? _ __   
  
“You should have gone with them…” Haye’s voice is a shade of forced calm that’s almost touching in all its soldier bravado.    
  
“I didn’t come with you guys to play hero.” Harry scans the blaster wound on her thigh. Still got a while before she’ll feel the pain from it, the painkillers in her system - the last ones - are still active but slowly wearing off. Once that happens her condition will deteriorate fast. He’s got a plan B and decent plan C. Beyond that lies nothing. “That’s your job. This is mine.”   
  
“Play hero.” She shakes her head. “This place… this fucking  _ place _ .”   
  
Later - it feels like days and he almost refuses to believe it when he reads the mission logs and realises it’s been a couple of hours - they lose their Pathfinder and Harry and Lexi work without rest to save the Pathfinder’s daughter.    
  
Shoulder to shoulder, barely breathing until she is.    
  
_ My kids, Harry. Sara and Scott, you need to promise me you’ll do everything you can for them. Everything.  _ __   
  
In the end it’s SAM that saves her life, like intended.    
  
“That’s definitely not according to medical protocol,” Harry says afterwards, suspecting that’s not even entirely true. Alec Ryder had been part of the initial process of the Initiative’s entire code of conduct, after all, had been knit into the web of plans and strategy. And now he’s gone. Alec Ryder who had seemed impossible to kill, like most N7, but who had been found dead all the same.   
  
Their promised land is hell. The core of everything is broken, shattered.     
  
“I think we left protocol behind,” Lexi agrees and there’s a little shift in the air between them; he can’t tell if it’s out of relief or fear.     
  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
_ Deep breaths _ , but Sara chokes on every unspoken word in her throat, every fractured memory resting in her bones.   
  
Dad teaching her how to program their household interfaces while Scott -  _ Scott, damn you just wake up _ \- had wanted to use the computer to play games; endless stretches of time when dad was just a vid call, a screen figure far away but they always talked about him so in a sense, Sara used to think, dad was more  _ there  _ than he was not, somehow noticed even in his absence; birthday parties, both those he came to and those he missed; a self-contained, proud kind of love that is nothing like a gentle guidance in her life and more like a hardened spine, holding her up.    
  
_ Gone _ .    
  
_ Deep breaths _ , and Sara’s fingers are stiff on the sheets when she sits up, grabbing everything in sight.     
  
“Tell me how I’m different.” She sits down again, this time near Harry’s desk in the medbay.    
  
There’s a dark shadow clouding his gaze for a moment, before he seems to regain his momentum and offers her a calm, professional glance.    
  
“Different?”   
  
“SAM.” She wonders why she isn’t more terrified, why it seems normal when it’s anything but normal, anything but ordinary. She wonders how far they have pushed their boundaries for her recovery through groundbreaking AI to appear fine,  _ Ryder, good to see you  _ and  _ glad to see you back on your feet _ . As if nothing has happened. As if the world hasn’t disappeared beneath their feet, pulled away like a carpet.  “I want… can I see the notes and everything you did.”   
  
“You can.” He nods, his face still sterner than she remembers it. As if recent events have turned them all a shade harsher. Then it morphs back. “Right now, though, you have other matters to attend to. Harper is looking for you.”   
  
“Harry, I-” she cuts herself off, shaking her head when she spots Lexi approaching them at a fast pace. It  _ itches _ , she thinks. Something at the back of her neck or below her chin, a thread of panic spreading like criss-cross patterns all over. Grandma - the most quietly brilliant person Sara has ever known - used to draw her own dot to dots for them whenever she babysat. Massive images of mountains and animals hiding beyond the magic of numbers. Now her body feels like one of those pictures; she isn’t sure what the connected dots will show.    
  
His gaze is still on her when he moves closer, when one of his hands brush against her shoulder and she exhales, slowly. Fingertips pressing down gently around the curve of her back; Sara counts her breaths before she sits upright again, squaring her shoulders and lifting her gaze.    
  
“We will make it okay,” she says.    
  
_ We will, won’t we? _   
  
“Yes,” Harry says, simply.    
  
In her head: that unfamiliar sort of shift, as though someone is moving through her thoughts.    
  
_ Your stress levels are increasing, Pathfinder.  _


	3. Sleeping dragons

  
  
  
  
“Oh, come on, Harry. There must be something I can say to change your mind.”   
  
Lexi scrutinizes him over the screen. Her body looks tense in a way he hasn’t seen it before, a hitch to the otherwise smooth lines that tells him she’s stressed and anxious like everyone else and - unlike some of them - hasn’t really got the experience to balance it out. He’s gradually come to realize how asari reason when it comes to aging work, finally feeling confident enough that he can refer to one of them as  _ inexperienced  _ or  _ seasoned  _ without committing too much of a faux-pas.   
  
“That position on the Tempest is yours.” They’re watching some staff scurry about packing for the promised departure. Apparently there are a few individuals on this station that can really get things moving, speak the right words to the right people and avoid pissing off the wrong ones, sneaking under the radar of idiots like Tann. Harry damn well can’t. He’s never been the type to successfully manipulate his way through the maze of easily hurt egomaniacs that make up organisations like this one. “Self-awareness is one of my many qualities, as you may have noticed.”   
  
“Indeed.”   
  
Brilliant, eccentric T’Perro. He had been smitten with her medical theories the moment he read her work on what could be described as an updated approach to  neuro-prosthetics and never quite found his way out of her maze of evidence and argumentation. Best thesis he’s ever read to date, a most convincing case for a broad and well-founded inter-species research center. If you ask him, and some people do.    
  
He’d wanted her along on this journey for more reasons that he can count, but the idea of picking her brains - pun always intended - about neuro-implants had definitely been on the list. She’s the kind of fellow professional he could spend an eternity with and not be bored.  _ No, not like that _ , he replies to his inner sarcastic voice. It’s nothing like that, not with her. She’s the asari sister he’s never had.     
  
They’re quiet together for a while as they both sign a few requisitions and journals; around them Hyperion gradually blends into the Nexus, one disoriented settler after another and it’s not the homecoming they were aiming for but clearly the best they can do right now.     
  
“What makes you turn it down?” Lexi asks eventually. She treads carefully - for a second he wonders if she suspects that he has ulterior motives behind this decision and it bugs the hell out of him. Why would he? What secret wealth of academic greatness or medical challenges could be hiding in this space hub that he’d be so reluctant to leave it? Why would she think of his like that, in that dark light? No, his reasons are entirely personal and he isn’t overly eager to spell them out for her.  _ Again _ . Hell, he isn’t all that eager to face them himself any more than he has to.    
  
“Everything,” he says, simply. Again.     
  
A deep exhale later she nods, if somewhat reluctantly.    
  
He hadn’t really expected to feel such relief; he hadn’t really imagined she would say yes.    
  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
  
Every time she visits Scott she approaches him with her eyes half-closed, her gaze fastened at her feet. It’s just for a few seconds but a desperate kind of prayer all the same, a compulsion, a superstition that runs deep. If she closes her eyes and counts to five, to ten, to a _billion_ then her brother will be awake when she looks at him next.   
  
He never is.  
  
“Damn shame about your dad.” Harry unfolds his arms, takes a few steps towards her. He looks at Scott, too and there’s a shadow sweeping across his face. “I’m sorry we couldn’t save him.”  
  
“I’m sure you did everything you could.”  
  
“Yeah, but still. We lost a Pathfinder on my watch.” His voice drops a note, turning a shade darker. “Doesn’t sit right.”   
  
She takes a seat on the unoccupied bed beside Scott’s and studies his hand for a moment. It’s not moving. It’s not been moving for over six hundred years and each one of those is a stitch of pain in her own body.    
  
They used to make up scenarios about Andromeda together, used to give in to each other’s most dramatic, curious streaks and paint wild images of unexplored maps and skies colored differently than the skies they know. This was never part of it. This was never part of the plan and the anger flares up inside her whenever she realizes it.   
  
“My dad knew the danger,” she hears herself say, shuffling the raw emotion behind an attitude her brother would see right through. Nobody else does. It’s both thrilling and completely overwhelmingly _sad_. “Part of the job.”  
  
Harry observes her for a beat, his gaze scratching softly at the surface of the facade around her as if he can sense it, but doesn’t want to let her know. As if she’d turn on her heel and run. Maybe she would.   
  
“We’re not losing any more Ryders at least,” he says.”I can promise you that.”  
  
She has a vision, a flash of horror as she thinks of all the gear that had been dropped at her her feet the other day, all the boxes full of medigel and shots to overcome all sorts of alien wildlife and those looks on people’s faces. Those hungry, hopeful eyes.   
  
“Thanks” Her throat itches. “That’s good to know.”  
  
Scott’s left eyebrow has a tiny scar that only Sara knows the history behind (he got a piercing after a pub crawl on shore leave but regretted it in the morning, still drunk, pulling it out carelessly without precision) and somewhere below the birthmark on his chin Sara once punched him with a model space ship, leaving wounds that had looked like pinpricks, or teeth. A brand new galaxy but a whole map of unforgotten history and it turns, turns, _turns_ until she presses her palms against the sheet, pushing herself to her feet.   
  
“Was there anything else you wondered about?”   
  
_Everything_.   
  
She’s already read her journal, cross-legged in a chair next to Scott’s bed with her throat constricting as the words had sunk in. SAM in her head, properly _in_ her head, not the way protocol describes it for all Pathfinders. Wired into her. There’s nothing she reads that describes the procedure as lethal; she feels _broken_ all the same. As she had been reading she had hoped for company, for someone - Lexi, Harper, _Harry,_ most of all she had hoped for Harry and his low-key sarcasm and reassuring voice \- to sit down beside her and read along, explaining the med-speak and the hollowness of it all but there’s a wide, respectful circle around her these days. As if she’s been handed a miniature galaxy all to herself and her thoughts. It might have been the dream for her teenage self but now it’s just a quiet nightmare sitting at the edge of her mind.    
  
Sara rakes a hand through her hair. It’s a familiar movement but not in her bones because it’s Scott who does that whenever he feels cornered or insecure, whenever he needs some extra seconds to _think_. Now the motion floats over to her, into her. Maybe they do belong to the hive mind they used to joke about, after all.   
  
Harry remains standing; she wishes he would sit down with her. Breach the distance and structure around them.   
  
“So you and Lexi swapped jobs?” she asks, locking her emotions away. There’s no time for that now that she’s Pathfinder. She can practically hear dad in her head whenever she wallows, trying to steer her away from it, plaster his pragmatic _reason_ all over. He would do that with _everything_ , every time she asked for his thoughts on something or when he had found out about a particular problem or dispute taking place in his absence. Big heroic dad coming home to set his kids straight, she used to think on bad days. On good ones she mostly just allowed herself to be surrounded by the kind of confident problem-solving that was his trademark.   
  
Harry tells her about their change of jobs and Sara listens, tilting her head to look at Scott at the same time.  
  
“You do have cold feet after all,” she says when he’s done and Scott is still not moving.   
  
“Cold feet?” Harry raises an eyebrow, then something lights up in his eyes as he seems to remember their conversation that night before departure. That one moment of hopeful relaxation they shared before everything turned into _shit_. “Well, maybe you can call it that.”  
  
“What else do you call it?”  
  
“Healthy doubts, maybe.” He grins, quickly and somewhat self-deprecatingly or some pretty endearing combination thereof. ”I don’t know. You know that moment when you realize you’re just getting too old?”  
  
“Um.” She shakes her head, wondering if it was meant as a joke or not, if she’s allowed to laugh. “No.”  
  
“Ha. Right.” He sounds amused. “Forgot who I’m talking to for a while there. But trust me, it happens.”  
  
She frowns, not bothering to hide it. “If you say so.”  
  
It’s a weird thing to say, she thinks. A strange path to walk for someone his age, for someone who’s signed up for this project in the first place. He’s hardly much older than her dad and there had been no mid-life crisis stopping Alec Ryder from barging through the galaxies like a god and here Harry stands, claiming he’s too old to join the settlers. It’s _weird_ and doesn’t fit what she knows about him and thinks she knows about him, the image she has of him in her head and the notion she’s already made. There’s a chafing little motion, a _noise_ that she can’t quite place.   
  
Harry doesn’t seem to spot the quiet discord.   
  
“Oh, I do.” That grin again, the one that leaps across the room and sits in her chest. “And at some point you just want to wake up and feel hope again, not arthritis”  
  
Sara can’t help but laugh now. “You’re not _that_ old.”  
  
For a second he looks at her, just looks at her, and there’s a movement somewhere inside her that she hasn’t felt in _years_ , maybe never.   
  
“Glad you think so,” he says then, simply.   
  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
  
He finds her again later, walking through the half-finished corridors down by the tech labs. There’s an expression on her face that makes him hesitate to approach her, a quiet line in the air around her that seems to be there only to repel unwanted company.    


And Pathfinder Alec Ryder is  _ gone _ . Harry keeps returning to that insight, like it’s the essence of something important he’s studying, the core of some obscure knowledge he tries to learn by heart. Whenever he looks at her now that loss is part of her outline. Alec, Scott, the Milky Way; a whole galaxy full of absences that he imagines he can interpret from observing the way she moves through the Nexus tonight.    
  
It’s silly, of course. Even if behavioral neurology used to be one of his best classes in college he’s not going to pretend he thinks he can tell a whole lot about a person by looking at them take a stroll on their own as they’re watching empty office spaces and construction sites.    
  
But he can tell she’s grieving. A jolt of regret hits him at the thought, a feeling of being guilty somehow. Guilty of  _ what  _ he doesn’t know. The part of him that used to feel deep regret for every life he and his colleagues couldn’t save is buried, has been buried since a few years into his first job, but never for good. It’s always there, always resurfacing in times of stress or great change and he’d say this particular situation qualifies as both of those things.    
  
She stops, then. Her entire body goes quiet and still and Harry comes to a halt as well, like a stalker in the shadows. It bothers him, that mental image, so he hurries forward to catch up.    
  
“I’m hoping for a research center here,” he comments when he approaches her and she’s glancing at him sideways without saying anything, clearly expecting him to speak first. “Seems appropriate.”   
  
Sara nods. “My dad used to wax poetically about all the research that would happen once we got to Andromeda.”    
  
“Sounds like him.”   
  
“Does it?” she asks then, surprising him a little. It’s something about the tone, the frail edges of it, that makes his chest feels tighter than usual. It’s a genuine, deeply honest question and he wishes he had a better, more honest answer than a nod and what he can only hope is a reassuring smile.    
  
Night is different out here but Harry has already begun to discern a few typical night signs even in this constructed little place in the middle of the Andromeda galaxy and now he’s spotting them one by one; they’re unfolding slowly like stars being lit in the sky. Sara sits down outside what would have been -  _ will be, of course it will be, pioneers’ optimism and all that  _ \- a science hub organised by an AI interface. Harry has been on two tours already - listened to the original plans and the modified ones - not even counting the first one, the virtual reality simulation of what life on the Nexus would be like.   
  
Harry retells the last tour to the best of his abilities, not leaving out the exhaustively boring bits about wall structure and the many different materials used for panels. Sara listens.    
  
He watches the solemn expression melt away somewhat at she loses herself in the mundane and the practical. It gives him a little sting of satisfaction that he’s been right, that he’s managed to decipher her mood and improve it. And his own, too, for that matter. The unsettled little echo at the back of his mind has stilled; those rattling voices of discomfort have gone to sleep.    
  
“He wouldn’t have chosen you if he didn’t think you’d be up for the task,” he says then, when everything’s been quiet between them for some time and Sara sits with her chin resting in her hands, looking endlessly,  _ hopelessly  _ young.    
  
“Yeah.” She sounds thoughtful, glances at him and squints her eyes a little as if she’s searching for something behind him. “I know. I’m mostly trying to figure out his game. Walking around here helps. I think.”    
  
“I see.”   
  
Harry knows for a fact that the strings had been pulled - forcefully and with much precision - for their new Pathfinder to be introduced to her new ship as soon as possibly. Even sooner, judging by the way most people talk. They’re in a hurry because they are running out of time, he knows that, too. The young woman by his side isn’t running towards that ship, though and this morning Lexi had muttered about it into her breakfast bowl down in the makeshift cafeteria. They can’t wake Scott up from his sleep fast enough, can’t fast-forward her recovery, can’t bulldoze over all her reasons for lingering in these hollow wings of a way too grand promise.    
  
“This place, though.” Her voice has transformed again, matured; for some reason that ability she has of being several people at once keeps him intrigued. Ridiculously so, even. He keeps wondering what she’d be like as a student, a co-worker, a friend. “I just… can’t make sense of it. Makes me  _ nervous _ .”   
  
Nodding, he spots a group of scientists heading their way, most of them seemingly lost in their datapads and omni-tools. Quick steps, hurried voices - the rhythm of their new home.   
  
_ Home _ . He’s never been much of a nostalgic or much of a patriot but six hundred light years can hit weird spots inside you, that’s for damn sure and inside him now is a growing longing for home. In the end, that’s what all this is about.    
  
“We’ll figure it out,” he hears himself say, with as much pretend-certainty as he can manage to drag out of his tired brain. “One way or the other.”

Sara tilts her head slightly, catching his gaze.    
  
“I’m going to hold you to that.”   
  
  
  



	4. Life on the frontier

 

“The moment something changes with your brother,” Harry assures her in an attempt to make her leave the Nexus, like rumour has it she’s about to do. Courtesy of one of the battling factions of the Nexus leaders. Tann’s willing to gamble to a certain extent but that willingness isn’t going to last for long unless there’s something in return, some kind of development that he can take credit for. And until the rest of the arks show up Ryder is the only currency for most of the bureaucrats and budding leaders stationed here. “I’ll let you know.”

“Promise.” Her voice is soft around the word and Harry nods, twice. It’s still foggy how this ended up being part of his missive - convince the Pathfinder to go find paths, you do seem to get along well with her, Harry - but now it is and he has pulled it off for as long as he could manage. Giving her - he hopes - at least a little room for her grief.

“I promise,” he says.

For a moment he lets his hand rest on her shoulder - briefly, no more than a second that bounces and stretches against his palm - in that well rehearsed motion he used to reserve for his patients back in a different life. A doctor’s sympathy, a neutral kind of comfort though he isn’t sure that’s what this is, not at all. Andromeda comes with a new set of structure and they can’t afford detachment, can’t even recreate it between the few souls that they have woken up from cryo. Whatever happens now, for better and for worse, happens in a group of close-knit individuals. There’s an unsettled twist to that thought - or to that thought in relation to her, maybe.

“Thank you, Harry.” Sara turns her head and looks at him, a small hint of a smile in the corners of her mouth.

He nods once more.

“Don’t be a stranger out there,” he says and means it.

A few hours later he stands among colleagues and watches as the Tempest slowly leaves its slot in the hangar for the first time since the over-eager group of pilots and engineers took it for its shakedown run. A red-haired woman to his left makes an excited sound as the ship leaves, catching Harry’s gaze over the group of people gathered around its absence. He offers her a polite smile and a handshake, not looking at the empty hangar or picturing himself in the medbay out there, crouching in the field on whatever planet they end up on. The woman is part of the biomedical team stationed here, he’s figured out as much from her lab coat and the people she surrounds herself with.

“Ellis,” she says.

“Zack,” a young man by her side adds as he’s striding forward.

“Harry.”

Handshakes, smalltalk, speculation. Life at the Nexus goes on.

  
  


* * *

 

  
  


Resilience - the place, not the word (or possibly both) - haunts her.

Even before SAM had reconstructed the events of the first colonists on Eos, long before she had found evidence of their hardships and struggles, this place had planted itself firmly under her skin. Far underneath, where she’s made of nothing but nightmares and raw terror. It has rooted itself in there somewhere among the echoes of the child she once was; behind the dark corners filled with memories of sleeping four people in a double bed and of Sara, come on, we’ve already banished the monsters from your closet twice tonight. Scott has never had trouble sleeping, Sara is somewhat of an insomniac even when moderately medicated; it has never been fair.  

The first colonists, starving like characters in one of those old books about Earth that mum kept in her study because she claimed to love the typography. Their settlers faced with the same hardships as those in mum’s books, but the settlers on Eos had nowhere to migrate to, no place to seek refuge in. They had been left to die under a sun that beats everything to the ground, a sun that turns the sand beneath their feet into coal, a quiet consuming fire.  

Even on the Nexus now that they’ve returned like temporary heroes, that site lingers. A whisper snaking in between every other thought, a quiet disturbance.

Even on the Nexus, a place she’s longed for ever since they headed out.

“Want to grab a few drinks with us, Pathfinder?”

Liam’s voice slips through the cracks in her concentration and Sara looks up from her reports. She’s sitting out in the open spaces far away from the ship and the labs and offices, typically does whenever they’re back here. Parks herself on a bench or cross-legged on the ground. It’s full of noise and she misses noise, misses crowds and chatter, the buzz of people eating, talking, working. Noise means life.

“Right now?”

“Yeah.” He nods, something almost apologetic hidden there at the corners of his voice, as if he’s expecting her to go all military on his ass. “No duty tonight and no time like the present, eh?”

Sara looks down at her reports - hopelessly depressing reports, all outlining the resources and lack of progress in their current colonies or what would be colonies if they could kick the atmosphere into shape - and then back up at Liam, thinking yes, hell yes. They've made huge progress on Eos, no one can deny that. Pods ready to go, order and forms already signed for the first batch of new settlers. Nobody would blame the Pathfinder for a bit of celebrating. Swallowing the last few weeks with a couple of beers, pushing them away, drinking them up. It’s what she would have done, before.

“I’ve got a few things I need to do,” she says instead, someone else operating inside her head, apparently. A better version of herself, her father’s damn ghost. Or an AI. “Next time, Costa.”

“Don’t I know it!”

Watching him leave with Gil and Suvi, Sara regrets her decision already. She could just catch up with them, could shut down her computer and get up and join them. Grab a few beers, try to laugh everything off and be like a normal person who forgets that part where she isn’t. Not anymore. Not that she ever was. The biotic twin. That part has been bothering her lately, as well, the biotic energy that feels slightly different out here but not different enough for her powers to alter. Only different in a way that jars inside, a new sort of shadow to her motions, perhaps. Or it could be all in her head.

She’ll try to talk to Cora about it, she decides as the crew heading for the bar has disappeared behind the corner. Find a moment to discuss their biotics.

It would be wise to mention it to Lexi as well, of course, but that seems to be the worst idea given how fond Lexi is of evaluations and examinations. Sara can only imagine how many tests she’d run, how much time would be spent trying to figure out every angle and aspect of the Pathfinder’s brain and body. There’s been more than enough of that lately.

The muffled noise from her crew disappears entirely and she sits back; the grey-blue light from her screen floats reassuringly into her vision and maybe that’s for the best.

  
  


* * *

 

  


The Nexus bores him to a degree he will never admit to anyone.

Well, not the space hub itself - he can’t fault it for serving exactly the purpose it was designed to serve - but the restrictions that come from being stationed at an ark that had been expected but then went missing and then gradually sort of slipped out of the emergency protocol that appeared after the Scourge. There’s a kind of status quo to that and it doesn’t sit right with him.

Harry is in charge of the medical staff on the Hyperion but he’s not in charge of anything at the Nexus and damn it if that doesn’t make a big difference to the amount of red fucking tape he has to go through just to get some developmental treatments approved. Before his - at least in his mind - simple requests are returned with a stamp of approval, they have to go through a ridiculous amount of procedures and evaluations and it just seems to him that the best way to kick off their new lives would be to ease up on these sort of things.

The Nexus bores him but he has no viable options so he makes do.

Or perhaps, he thinks at times, it’s not boredom as much as it’s frustration. The Nexus is a four-ring circus, wasn’t that what Kesh had said the other day. Elbowing his way to the top among other doctors had been one hell of a ride too, but it’s nothing compared to this.

His apartment suite is comfortable and he keeps it tidy; every day after wrapping up work down in the medbay he works out at the intuitively designed, top-notch functionality gym and in the evenings he shuts out pointless brooding by going out or talking one of the few soldiers stationed nearby into coming with him to the battle simulations.

If it comes down to that, if they all need to be constantly fighting for the survival of their own species and their right to exist here in Andromeda, Harry wants to at least stand a chance.

“Habitat 7 sure fucked you up, huh?” Ellis asks when he joins her group of lab rats for a drink at the Vortex Lounge afterwards.

“Would be troubling if it hadn’t.” He shrugs, orders a bottle of ale.

“Especially with ninety percent of our security and soldier crew in exile.” She grins. “Yeah. I sleep with all of my tech turned on. Monitors everywhere. Just in case, you know?”

“Yeah,” Harry replies though it had been a rhetorical question. “I know.”

He observes their little group of people for a beat, then turns his gaze towards the other scattered groups in the night club. The atmosphere has shifted gradually over the past few weeks, gone from frustration to hopefulness and then back to a more balanced middle-ground. There are setbacks and obstacles but hope. Some kind of release, a chance to catch one’s breath and venture a guess or two about the future, thinking there even is one. The Pathfinder and her team has accomplished that and it echoes through their makeshift society. We crave the unexplored wonders that no doubt will reshape all that we know. Jien Garson had said that a couple of times before departure, then again in the recorded messages that followed them to their cryosleep, like a strange lullaby. He's pretty convinced she had been right.

Hunger for light, for life. It’s essentially human, he supposes, that deep need for expansion and adventure even under ever-altering circumstances - or perhaps because of those. Still, people need to be in a reasonably safe context to thrive. That, too, is ancient knowledge.  
  
“And the Pathfinder dubbed Eos a science settlement.” Ellis’s tone is neutral but she makes a little grimace. It grates a bit in his mind - apparently a new galaxy can do wonders for your sense of loyalty to superiors, he thinks and nearly grimaces himself.   
  
Harry shrugs. “If I can shoot at kett, then a couple of lab rats should be more than capable to.”   
  
“Oh come on, you’re a field medic, don’t tell me you never had any training?”   
  
“That was in another lifetime,” he says. It wasn’t, but it sure feels that way. A lot of things that he puts in the section of his past that he’s somehow cleared out, pushed away behind a locked door which he has now also forgotten the key to. Compartmentalization, Harry. You’ve always been good at tending to your cognitive dissonances. 

Ellis downs her drink and shakes her head.

Harry returns to the cryo bay an hour and two drinks later to find the Pathfinder in a chair next to her brother; she's reading aloud from a datapad, her voice leaping back and forth across the otherwise empty room. There's a gentleness in the scene that makes him regret stepping right into it but it's too late to stop as Ryder – the awake, conscious one – turns her head and throws him a glance over her shoulder.

And falls silent.

“Don't stop on my account.” Harry walks over to the monitoring screens, scanning them briefly. Nothing new in the last couple of hours - had there been any proper news he would have been notified but he’s always double-checking. Triple-checking, even, when it comes to Scott Ryder.  
  
“It was… nothing important anyway.” She lets the datapad drop to rest on the cover of her brother’s bed. Rakes a hand through her hair and looks over his shoulder at the monitors. “What are those for?”  
  
Harry has to follow the direction of her gaze to see what she means, lets his own eyes join hers for a second. Shared vision. Damn, he’s getting tired, or possibly a little drunk. She seems to notice, because the corners of her mouth twitch, moving upwards.   
  
“Just different levels of vitals screening,” he says. “Some very in-depth, others not so much. Sleep cycles, brain waves - I’m certain you’ll doze off if I elaborate too much there.”   
  
Or maybe she won’t. _Analytical skills and a lively, questioning mind_ , Lexi had concluded recently in one of her many reports from the ship. _Displays some trouble with authorities_ but then, Harry thinks, who in their right mind doesn’t? _  
___  
Her hands are on her brother’s arm again and he wants to say something about it, about him, but before she’s come up with a reasonably neutral and yet inspiring bit of bullshit - there’s nothing to do now but to wait; he’s in good hands; the prognosis is really positive - the Pathfinder stands up, takes a few steps towards him.  
  
“Can we get out of here for a while,” she asks and nods towards the atrium outside. “I mean, I’d like to talk but- it’s pretty distressing to watch him like this, you know.”   
  
“Of course.”  

The invisible weight that presses her down inside the cryo bay is noticeably less of an issue once they’ve removed themselves from the ever-present monitoring stations. Heck, even Harry breathes easier out here and he considers pretty much any lab or medical facility his spiritual home. It’s just that they’ve been on the Hyperion for too long now, its contours and shapes like badly healed wounds in everyone’s thoughts. Debris, _disturbances_ .   
  
“So, how do you like the Tempest?” he asks, realizing he’s been wondering about it ever since she left in that already-famous shuttle.   
  
Her face relaxes, her shoulders slump down. As if she’s been holding them up and only just now realized it. There’s much of Ellen in that posture, so many traces and inherited habits and vices; he wonders if anyone in the family had bothered to list them all. In his head, all emotional reasons aside, that would be the truly riveting part of parenthood: to follow your kid’s footsteps back to your own DNA, find your own intellectual footprints woven into their understanding of the world. Judith hadn’t been impressed with that way of thinking, had never even bothered to come up with a counter-weight to that particular argument. He can’t say he blames her; he had blamed her for the better part of the last ten years of their marriage.   
  
“It’s great.” The Pathfinder smiles, glancing at him. “I’ve got my own little room for combat sims. Enough said.”   
  
Harry can picture her in one of those, running like a hamster while in transit. Catching every moment of time available to her, gathering chances to optimize and synchronize, treating life like a battlefield. Most soldiers reason like that, most medics don’t.   
  
“I hope Doctor T’Perro makes sure you rest sometimes, as well.”   
  
She gives him a little frown that renders her face even younger. Reminding him of something he’s not sure he wants to remember.   
  
“Well, I’ve got some additions to the team that I want to read up on. And more messages from everyone out here than I can possibly go through without losing my mind.” She flickers her screen at him, as though he’s needing proof of the mass communication that goes on right now. Bottled-up needs. It’s a thing for most of them but for her, he reckons, it would of course be a hundred times worse. Favors being asked, advice being offered, investigations and rumors building up in every corner. “But once that’s done, sure.”   
  
They sit for a while without speaking, resting in the late-night shuffle of doors and footsteps around them. Harry feels he’s reached the point of either wanting another drink or hitting the bed and can’t really figure out which option he craves the most, only knows that it’s that particular point when he usually leaves a bar.  

“We miss you out there,” Ryder says eventually. “At least I do.”  
  
A drink, he decides. _Definitely_ a drink. There’s a quiet throbbing circling his temples and forehead, as though the headache is in orbit around him, looking for places to hit. A moving kind of discomfort, like her gaze on him now. 

“Doctor T’Perro is exactly what you need.” He doesn’t mean for it to come off as a cranky old man’s retort but it does and it lands that way in her, too. He can tell by the look on her face and that knowledge bothers him, gets under his skin and remains there like a bad itch. What did she want to talk to him about? “And not only because she loves writing evaluations for all of you.”  
  
“Right.” She blinks, as if returning her focus to the present. “Wait, _what_ ? Is that a regular thing?”   
  
“Sending me reports on you and your crew?” He nods, smiling to take the edge off his earlier crankiness. “Absolutely.”   
  
Ryder rubs the bridge of her nose and shakes her head. When she looks at him again, she looks both softer and older than before, her edges both smudged out by weariness and sharpened by it. Time and aging will need a while to catch up with them, he figures. After six hundred years asleep their bodies are gradually returning to ordinary aging patterns, snapping back into a proper timeline. Medically speaking it doesn’t really work like that, but he thinks of it that way. Takes some liberties with science these days, figures he’s earned it.   
  
“I hope I don’t come off as an idiot in those,” she mutters.   
  
“I can’t see any reason you would.” Resisting the impulse to touch her arm or her back, reassure her in ways that are entirely too familiar and intimate for the sort of relationship they have - and not pausing to think of why that is, what the hell his mind is going through - Harry folds his arms across his chest and leans back in his seat. Watching her. “Trust me, I’ve done this gig for a long while.”   
  
“You mean people are usually crazier than I am?” Her voice is thick with humour and he relents into the relief.     
  
“Definitely.”   
  
A quick laugh, trickling down between them. “Good to know.”   
  
She sits back, too, resting the back of her head against the wall panel behind them and throwing Harry the occasional sideways glance. They don’t say anything else and after a while she begins working again, flicking through messages and double-checking things on her omni-tool. Harry just sits there and when he’s called to the cryo bay he feels the reluctance to leave the scene like a beat in his own body, a rhythm in his steps.   
  
Before he loses sight of her completely he looks at her one last time; her gaze meets his then, as if she can physically feel his attention in the air around her. He can't say if that's good or bad, probably a bit of both.   
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the glacial slowness when it comes to updating this. I'll try to do better.


	5. Collision is imminent

 

On the way to the Onaon system Sara takes up office right by Suvi and Kallo at the bridge, imagining somehow that this is what dad would have done. Would he? Hell if she knows but at least it  _ feels  _ like something from a memory she could have, watching him watch the stars around them. Maybe he’d go over orders or work - yeah, probably work, she decides since she can’t remember ever having seen him without a half-finished project or a report to bury himself in. Scott used to do impressions of him in his almost constantly empty office in their flat, would sit by dad’s stray screens and lab equipment and mimic some of their dad’s expressions to make Sara laugh.    
  
“ _ No Alliance Corsair for you two tonight; for Friday night funtimes I’m going to teach you how to reprogram a hostile AI.”  _ __   
  
Now, all these hundreds of years away from that spot of safety, Sara’s sitting here, pretending in her own way to be like their father. She’s trying to get the rundown on what they know about the mission ahead of them but it’s mostly a blur of Peebee’s erratic notes - and just as erratic live commentary - and wild speculation from the researchers.    
  
All you need to do is decide what life in Andromeda means, no pressure, Addison had told her and Sara had quipped something stupid as usual, pushed back the retorts she would have wanted and opted for a Pathfinder-y option. Something in between, a road to follow.    
  
And everything that happens next: a clash, a crash course, double-down crisis mode and then suddenly the planet that sprawls beneath them, full of colours and threats.    
  
Sara takes a few seconds to recover from the brutal landing, allows herself to stare at her own reflection in wide-eyed disbelief before clearing her throat and grabbing her gun.  _ Fuck diplomatic intentions _ . Costa, she knows, would have done the same. That notion makes her hesitate again and she holsters the gun, at least, shoving it out of sight. When it comes to these things she’ll  _ have  _ to do better than her crew, or she won’t have a single reason for being Pathfinder when they are not.   
  
__ Good thinking, Pathfinder.

“Shut up, SAM,” she mutters, swallows a mouthful of fear and steps out into the unknown.    
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
“You’d think they would ease up on the paranoia now that our Pathfinder has secured Eos.” Ellis pushes her lab glasses up over her forehead, using them as a too-big diadem instead. It makes her look like a schoolgirl.    
  
“Seems it’s a long way to go yet,” Harry retorts.    
  
They’re slipping into a routine together down by the small food stall near the science labs: work, two bowls of today’s protein salad - tuna-flavored or chicken-flavored, the Nexus doesn’t offer much in the terms of lunch meat choices - and then half an hour or so of comfortable whining about the state of things. It’s an informal little collegial session that apparently does them both good, otherwise he’s sure they’d find a reason to just drop it.   
  
No, the truth is that Harry has begun to look forward to it and at this point in his life at the Nexus he isn’t about to turn down  _ anything  _ that he can look forward to. Well, he can think of a few things but beyond those he’s up for it.    
  
After wrapping up their lunch today he returns to a much less light-hearted medical work that demands his attention. A new patient. A Bryce Jenner, colonist with inoperable metastasized cancer in its final stages, who has been referred to him recently.    
  
_ Wanted to see a new galaxy before I died, forged some false medical reports, can you blame me,doc? _ __   
  
Harry can’t. The waste of it all soars through him like a jolt of pain but he’s not jaded enough to consider this man a liability or a flaw in the system, an unworthy candidate in their space journey. Sure, Jenner won’t manage any big breakthroughs or father a long line of children but for all they know at this point, neither will Harry Carlyle. 

He takes a seat opposite the patient, clicks open his screen; normally he’d offer a polite smile, a professional kind of intimacy to make his patient feel at ease. He doesn’t now.  
  
“Your scans show an increased tumor activity,” he says instead. “The cancer is active again. I’m sorry.”  
  
Jenner nods. He knows, of course. Brain tumor. Nobody with a brain tumor can fail to sense its dark, heavy progress, only very few manage to ignore its beckoning, the way it spreads and tangles. In this case the growth will increase fairly quickly now that it’s returned with full force, leaving very little brain tissue untouched when it’s done with Jenner. When Jenner is done here. Cancer is as unfair as ever, all these light years away.  
  
“Glad we secured Eos, though.” He’s the one who smiles, a brief, tentative kind of smile. And then audibly inhales, making a sound that reminds Harry of a door opening. “I want to die down there. On Eos. Solid ground beneath my feet and all that.”  
  
“I’m not sure how procedure would-”  
  
“It’s sentimental, doc. I know. But it’s what I’ve got left now, isn’t it? Planning my death.”

Harry should protest. Under any other circumstances he  _ would  _ protest. It’s deeply rooted in any doctor, the instinct that tells you that leaving the medical decisions to the patients is rarely a good idea. Medicine isn’t run on gut feeling and sentiments and that’s what he’d - put it in nicer words, wrap it in a cloak of concern and genuine empathy that wouldn’t in any way hide the harsh truths of it all. Medicine is run on evidence and fact. And the facts in this case would be that the final stage of cancer is incredibly painful without sufficient medication - the final stages of cancer living on a barely settled desert planet with so much of it still unexplored - no, Harry would not ever advice anyone to do what Jenner is asking now.  
  
“It’s a tricky request,” he says, because this is a different life in a different galaxy and he finds himself nodding. “I’ll see what I can do about it.”   
  
  


* * *

 

 

The thick jungle of Havarl seems to stick to her skin even indoors, a humid kind of smell lingering in her hair, on her hands. It’s psychological, most likely, a body memory that won’t go away with tech or chemicals. The same kind of memory that offers her images of things she cannot possibly recall: her mother singing her to sleep as an infant, rocking her little body back and forth in her arms; the scent of flowers on that colony beachfront they only visited once, when Sara was two; the way they used to sleep with Scotts arms and legs around her back and Sara's arms and legs around his.  _ Little marsupials _ , dad would say about the photos from that time.  _ Clinging together like one of you had a pouch _ . 

Pelaav research station isn’t a haven or any kind of dream come true as far as lodgings go but it’s dry and even-tempered so she decides that it will do. Takes a seat among the scientists and the odd soldiers and goes over today’s mission while carefully shutting out the idea and sound of the various life forms outside these walls.     
  
“We’ve made good progress, I think.” Harper paces the floor beside Sara, throws her a glance as she’s passing by.     
  
Sara looks up and nods. “Hard to tell right now but yeah.”   
  
The fact that they have made progress at  _ all  _ getting the angara to trust them is probably enough to be considered good, but Sara is an over-achiever and eager to prove her worth after the slow and rocky start. She’d have liked more results, more actual  _ reports  _ to send back to the Nexus crowd. Hell, she would have given anything to actually have trekked deeper into the terrain by nightfall but Jaal had advised against it and since she’s promised herself to trust him while they’re here, she had cancelled those vague plans and aborted mission. For now.    
  
Instead she has stale bread with angaran jam and quite a lot of half-finished thoughts she wants to throw at someone.    
  
_ Scott _ . She would like to throw them at her brother, now more than ever. Text him about suspicious aliens and terrifying wildlife, get all worked up over this lush jungle being pretty much the kind of planet they would dream up back home when this mission was more of a fairy tale than an actual plan and their heads full of far-fetched dreams and nightmares. If nothing else, that kind of banter calms her down.    
  
With an inwards groan she shuts down SAM’s latest documented evaluation of her combat profile and the many ways in which it can be improved. No time for that now. She can practically hear the hungry beasts outside, how their mouths open and close, how their claws click and sharpen against the ground.    
  
Harper is damn good at her job but she’s not Scott. The closest thing Sara has found on the Tempest is Liam - and Suvi. When the lieutenant paces away from her again, Sara gets to her feet, intent on finding one of them for some casual chatting and possibly a beer.    
  
The message signature that dully goes beep on her still-open screen isn’t Liam’s, however. It’s Doctor Carlyle’s and her throat swells immediately, a jolt of terror numbing her entire body as she lets the call through.    
  
“Let me first just assure you that Scott is fine.”    
  
She blinks. Harry Carlyle’s face and body appears before her and he holds one hand up, as though trying to stop her from worrying. Catching her fear in his palm. It’s an ineffective and slightly annoying way of getting the first word, she thinks, feeling her frown go deep and dark.    
  
“Scott is fine?”   
  
He nods. His face is so serious that she suddenly thinks something worse might have happened back there - another uprising, an alien invasion, full-blown war - there’s no end to her imagination in this brave new galaxy.    
  
“He is. Absolutely fine. There’s no change, he’s still doing well under the circumstances. Sorry for bothering you, but-”   
  
And then she listens to him explain a heart-wrenching case of a brain tumor and an upcoming funeral, hears him speak of authorizations that has to go through a Pathfinder, of Nexus paperwork and precious little time left to work with. Around her the angara come and go and some of them stare openly at her where she sits cross-legged on a pile of boxes, having a conversation about life and death. Others keep that neutral glare that she has come to recognize over the past few days. There’s no telling yet which approach she prefers.    
  
“So we’re helping one of our guys get the death he’s always dreamed about?” she asks when Harry has finished and his voice has faded away into the night on Havarl. And the Nexus. “That’s what you want me to do?”   
  
“That’s er, correct.” Harry nods again. One of his hands come up to scratch at the back of his neck. Sara watches the broad arm and its muscles, follows the endless lines of him as he moves.    
  
“Right.” She wonders if he’s usually sentimental or if it’s the incredible newness to everything that calls for different approaches. She wonders if dad would have done the same for her mother. “I don’t know how to go about it but sure. I’ll help. Tell me how.”   
  
“That’s great, thank you!” He sounds genuinely grateful and somehow the tone of his voice gets far beneath her skin, rendering her  _ useless  _ for a moment. With all the missions and travels she sometimes forgets that what truly manages to get to her isn’t combat proficiency - though she is a sucker for that, too - or gear or even the technological joy of being in charge of a cutting-edge vessel. No, it’s the human connection she longs for. Even now, especially now.    
  
Connections - a string of reactions and actions running from one human body to another. From Harry to her. The thought burns at the back of her mind.    
  
“No problem. Well, I’m  _ assuming  _ it won’t be a problem.”    


He chuckles, dark and low.    
  
“How’s the mission over there?” he asks just when she thinks he’ll end the call and there’s a surge of relief that he asks.    
  
“You want the short version or the long version?”    
  
He pauses for a brief moment, a tucked-in kind of smile spreading on his face. “The long one. If you have time.”   
  
Sara shifts position slightly, finishes her last piece of bread with jam and clears her throat.    
  
“For you? All the time in the galaxy.”   
  
They both laugh, a scattered sound that spreads all over the place and confuses her enough not to have to think about what she intends with that remark, what it  _ means _ .    
  



End file.
